On Dec 8, 2008, at 1:34 PM, James Finstrom wrote:

> okay I have nothing super secret and no valid reason to use it but I  
> want to play with it so I will probably have the most secure benign  
> documents in the world. Any opinions on truecrypt  and other similar  
> programs.  Anyone use this type of software due to need not as a toy?

Whether you have anything secret or not is irrelevant.  If it's your  
data, you should be able to do whatever you like with it.  You don't  
need a 'valid' reason to do something that's perfectly legal.

I used TrueCrypt to do full-disk encryption on an 80GB external USB  
hard drive on a ThinkPad T40 (1.4 GHz Pentium M) running Xubuntu  
8.04.  Any time I had the disk attached, it pegged my CPU and was  
nearly unusable.  I gave up at that point, though there may have been  
more tweaking I could do to get it running better.  I would like to  
revisit that at some point, but I'm guessing it'll need to be after  
the next time I do a hardware upgrade.

alex